MegaTen is my favorite franchise next to Final Fantasy. It’s hard for me to decide which franchise I like more, though I’ve never bothered to try and obtain the super-deluxe premium edition of a Final Fantasy game, so maybe that says something.

The Persona 5 Take Your Heart Premium Edition will set you back $89.99, and that’s a lot of bux. (It will probably set you back a whole bunch more bux if you didn’t preorder it.) Is it worth that many bux? Well, the standard launch edition is $69.99, and there’s a lot of stuff in the Take Your Heart edition, so yes. It is worth that many bux.

Obviously, we have the game itself. It comes in this super neat steelbook. I believe you also get the steelbook if you ordered the standard launch edition.

Le back.

I’m a big fan of steelbooks. I think they look cool, they’re shiny, and they’re much more durable than a plastic case. Even the inside is attractive.

Next, we have this hardcover art book entitled Persona 5: The Aesthetics.

I appreciate the hard cover. It’s going to look very nice on my shelf. The pages inside are matte rather than glossy, but the art is crisp and colorful.

Paging through it is going to be fun, and if I decide that I’m going to need to do some cosplay, this is going to be an excellent reference.

It’s a Persona game, so it goes without saying that the soundtrack is going to be awesome.

Haven’t listened to it yet, but I’m looking forward to rocking out to it in my car. It seems to me that if you’re selling your collector’s edition for 90 bux that you could spring for the extra 75 cents or whatever for a jewel case for your soundtrack CD instead of a cardstock envelope, but I guess it gets the job done. A lyrics booklet would have been cool, though.

One of my favorite inclusions is the Morgana plush.

As you can see, she’s not very big. My hand is here for size reference, but disclaimer: I have very small hands. So she’s probably even smaller than you’re thinking. She’s cute, though, and I’m really excited about this particular mascot character. Persona 3’s Koromaru was stupid adorable, and Persona 4’s Teddy was creepy as hell, but a talking kitty named after a powerful and dangerous Arthurian sorceress? YES PLEASE.

Speaking of danger, Morgana comes with her own disclaimer.

Huh. Apparently she’s both flammable and unsuitable for children. Sounds like my kind of cat.

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve got a Shujin Academy school bag.

I was expecting the bag to be on the small side and probably cheaply made, and I was correct on both counts. It’s too small for my (admittedly huge) laptop, but I could keep my Dungeons and Dragons stuff in it. Also, it will be great for the aforementioned cosplay. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it’s lined inside.

There are no interior pockets or anything, which is a little disappointing, but not unexpected. It’s really not a bad little bag. I could use it as a purse. Bonus: I’m pretty sure it’s waterproof.

So there you have it. The Persona 5 Take Your Heart Premium Collector’s Edition. Worth it? I would say so. Worth it now that you’ll have to pay a scalper’s price on eBay? …Ehhh, maybe? But I’m satisfied. Boyfriend’s satisfied.

Boyfriend even got a bonus in the form of the bag in which Amazon wraps its gift purchases. He has re-appropriated it as a super creepy face mask.

See? The Take Your Heart edition has something in it for everyone.

UPDATE 7/26/17: So it took me 20-30 hours of gameplay to realize that Morgana…is male? Neither the name nor the English voice actor in any way made that clear, but, uh, sure? I mean, I guess he keeps talking about how hot Ann is, and I guess a lesbian or bisexual mascot character was too much to hope for, BUT STILL. Disappointing. And confusing.

Also, contrary to my expectations, that academy bag is remarkably durable and roomy, as it turns out. I’ve been using it as a rehearsal bag for the summer Shakespeare play in which I’m performing, and I can fit my script, my 20-pound Norton Shakespeare Complete Works, two paperbacks, ten comic books, pens, pencils, and a tupperware snack container in there with a little room left over.

Well, I’ve finally managed to stop playing long enough. It only took a few weeks.

While it’s true that my desire to own a PS4 was primarily driven by the need to play Persona 5 in its purest form, I’m not letting the system lie dormant until April. Instead, I’ve been obsessively playing both World of Final Fantasy and Gravity Rush for the past few weeks. and while I am enjoying both games immensely, it’s World of Final Fantasy that’s really got me hooked. It pushes every single one of my gamer buttons in the best ways possible while delivering a charmingly nonsensical plot built upon adorable piles of nostalgia.

Although this game represents the maiden voyage of first-time game director Hiroki Chiba, Tetsuya Nomura designed many of the characters original to the game, so it’s unsurprising that many of them look like they could have escaped from a Kingdom Hearts game.

They’re named like Kingdom Hearts characters, too.

The plot is also like something out of a Kingdom Hearts game. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kingdom Hearts. I’ve played most of the games in the franchise. But that plot, y’all. If you can call it a plot. It might be more accurate to describe it as a fever dream made mostly of keyblades and awkwardly positioned zippers.

The plot of your game might be too complicated if it requires flowcharts to explain.

So in World of Final Fantasy, the story follows a pair of twins named Lann and Reynn who have lived in a timeless pocket dimension for some unspecified number of years.

^ Reynn Lann^

One day, a talking white fox with a crown on its butt appears on Lann’s head while he serves coffee at Totally-Not-Starbucks to a mysterious woman who may or may not be God.

The face of God…?

Reynn and Lann discover that they are Pokemon Trainers…I mean, mirage keepers, and they must journey through the mysterious land of Grymoire, a world full of Final Fantasy franchise characters, monsters, locations, and spells. The kingdoms of Grymoire are being annexed by the (clearly evil) Bahamutian Federation. There are a bunch of equally mysterious and clearly evil bad guys in improbable costumes lurking about and muttering ominous things about prophecies.

I wonder how long it takes that knight to put on her parrot cosplay every morning.

Reynn and Lann must embark on an adventure through the kingdoms, running into as many Final Fantasy cameos as possible, capturing mirages, and rediscovering their pasts.

I love it.

The systems underpinning this silly romp through the land of nostalgia are deeply satisfying to the classic JRPG gamer in me. It’s turn-based menu combat, for one thing, which is, as far as I am concerned, the hallmark of a Final Fantasy game (looking askance at you, Final Fantasy XIII and XV).

The Active Time Battle system makes a triumphant return. You can adjust the speed and you can even turn it off, if you like, but I’ve been playing on the second-fastest speed, and I’ve been pleased by the pleasant challenge that this offers, particularly if you’re facing off against a large mob of monsters who are throwing a barrage of attacks at you as you scroll desperately through your menu to select the most effective abilities to defeat your enemies as efficiently as possible. At slower speeds, the ATB drags painfully, and turning the battles from Active to Wait makes them boring, so I would definitely recommend playing them at as fast a speed as you are comfortable.

Most of the strategy, however, comes from organizing your stacks. Your party is comprised of Reynn, Lann, and four of their captured mirages configured into two “stacks.” Basically, you wear adorable renderings of classic Final Fantasy baddies as hats. It’s all very silly.

Alternately, while you are in Lilikin form, large mirages can wear you as a hat. I’m not sure which is sillier.

Despite the undeniable silliness, the whole thing is wonderfully complicated and interesting. By changing which mirages are within which stacks, you are able to completely change the stats, skill load-outs, strengths, and weaknesses of your stacks as a whole. Abilities “stack” as well, meaning that, for example, if you have two mirages in your stack who know Fire, you can cast Fira. It’s an addictive and endlessly customizable system. Especially once you add in the exciting fact that every mirage has its own tiny sphere grid!

*heavy breathing*

Mechanically-speaking, it’s a very solid game. As for the aforementioned plot? Well, it’s a hot mess of madness made even weirder by some cheerfully hammy voice acting and a localization that appears to have been crafted by slightly tipsy hipster nerds. I don’t know if things are a little more sedate in the Japanese voice tracks, but the English version is unilaterally crazypants bananas. When Lann isn’t making a nonsensical non-joke, he is misunderstanding every situation and statement directed towards him, usually in head-scratchingly stupid ways that would only make sense if he were catastrophically stoned 100% of the time.

The rest of the dialogue is equally weird. Tama (the fox with a crown on its butt) speaks the-with the “adorable” the-quirk of adding the word “the”in front of random the-words. Some mirages make up entirely new words.

Some mirages speak in hilariously inappropriate slang.

Even the mirage descriptions climb aboard the redonk train, making terrible puns, Final Fantasy in-jokes, and the occasional American pop-culture reference.

Now, I just want to be clear: I am not complaining. It’s endlessly fascinating to see what weird-ass thing the localization is going to do next. The cutscenes are constant, but they are never boring, because there is a 100% guarantee that someone will say something completely ridiculous. I admire the aplomb and gravitas with which these (presumably) professional, adult voice actors read some of these lines.

The game is quite nice to look at, with a colorful, cartoon-y style and bright, attractive colors. The chibi re-imaginings of classic Final Fantasy characters are more than tolerably charming.

Look at tiny Yuna’s tiny, adorable, angry eyebrows!

The backgrounds are full of depth and rich color, and the monster designs are attractive and varied, though it wouldn’t be a Final Fantasy game without the occasional palette swap.

I have few real complaints about this game thus far. I wish the music were better, but holding the soundtrack of every game up to the Uematsu gold standard is probably unreasonable. There’s nothing in the game’s soundtrack that is bad, exactly, it’s just bland. It sounds a bit like the slow pianos of Kingdom Hearts, but without the groove, and with more lame remixing of old Final Fantasy tunes. Other than this minor gripe, I am having a blast. It’s doing everything I want a game to do, and it’s doing those things pretty well.

Playing World of Final Fantasy is like snorting pixie stix of nostalgia — it’s colorful, saccharine, and kind of weird, but it tastes pretty great.

At long last, the PlayStation4 is mine. (THANKS, BOYFRIEND.) After a surprisingly sedate Black Friday scramble, we took advantage of GameStop’s deal on the Uncharted 4 bundle, netting a free copy of The Last of Us: Remastered for our trouble. The original plan was to get in on Kohl’s PS4 deal, which was admittedly rather less straightforward but would have netted us $75 in pretend money that we could only spend a week later. Kohl’s, however, seems to have stocked an approximate total of 2.5 PS4s, so they were long gone by the time we got there. On the whole, I preferred GameStop’s game-in-the-hand deal.

Neither Uncharted nor The Last of Us are my kind of game (which is why I am going to watch Boyfriend play those), but lucky (?) me, I’ve owned Final Fantasy Type 0 HD for over a year, after having preordered it with the express purpose of gaining access to the Final Fantasy XV demo that I loved so much, so I also had a game to play. A visit to our local library allowed us to snag a few more to try, and I downloaded a few demos from the PlayStation Store, too. My next-gen odyssey has begun!

The PlayStation4 Slim itself is quite a nice piece of hardware. It’s much smaller and lighter than I was expecting, even for something calling itself the “Slim”. It’s so quiet. Its operation is not dissimilar to the PS3, but its UI is rather more intuitive. Here are some things that I really like about the PS4 as a system:

It allows me to suspend my game while I open another application and holds my place until I return to it. (I can almost hear Boyfriend hollering from the other room, “What, like PCs have been able to do since forever?!“)

I can take my own screen shots with zero effort. (Boyfriend: “You mean like on a computer?!“)

Finding my friends is much easier with simple Facebook integration.

The DualShock 4 is insanely comfortable to hold, it has a touch pad, and it lights up, which is neat. It’s got a headphone jack in the controller itself, which is just fucking brilliant. You plug a pair of headphones in to the controller in your hand, and suddenly you are no longer at risk of waking your partner in the next room. The sound quality is quite nice, too! The lack of a Start button is, however, continually confusing to me and just seems on some level to be full of a deep, existential wrongness. How can a controller exist with no Start button? Madness. In addition, the battery life is significantly shorter than that of the DualShock 3. And man, Sony, why you gotta make these buggers so expensive? Having to throw down sixty bux for asecond controller seems a little excessive.

The console has a “rest mode” which conserves power, downloads things, and charges the controllers, something that is clearly necessary given the short battery life.

It’s the games that make a console worth having, however, so let’s talk about the ones I’ve played so far!

World of Final Fantasy Demo

This is one of the games that persuaded me that it was finally time to make the upgrade. (The other is, of course, Persona 5.) While my copy of the full game hasn’t yet arrived, I really enjoyed the demo. The gameplay consists of good old turn-based combat with menus (<3!) with a monster collecting mechanic a la Pokemon. Your party consists of two characters, Lann and Reynn, who in battles are stacked with a bunch of other Final Fantasy creatures, like so:

Creatures (called Mirages) come in Small, Medium, or Large, and they need to be stacked in that order. Lann and Reynn have the ability to be either Large or Medium, so they have the option to stack two smaller Mirages on their heads or ride on a Large Mirage themselves. As you can see, I have elected to ride an Ahriman while having a Moogle on my head, a thing I never knew I wanted until it was an option. Each stack of creatures can use any of the abilities present in the stack, so experimentation is highly encouraged. Each Mirage has its own skill tree, so I am going to have all the fiddly bits I ever wanted. Also, I can ride a Behemoth around, so what’s not to like here?

Unravel Demo

I also tried out the Unravel demo, a game starring a little dude made of red yarn exploring an old lady’s back yard. It’s a really cute concept, and it appears to be a pretty solid puzzle-platformer. I always appreciate platformers in which I don’t have to worry about being attacked while attempting to land jumps, so I quite enjoyed my leisurely jaunt through the first level. The environmental puzzles seem logical, and the yarn mechanics are fun and varied. You’re made of yarn, but you can also use your yarn to swing from trees, rappel up and down furniture, and create ramps.

The game is very pretty to look at, and the music is soothing. I wasn’t floored by the game, but I might pick it up at some point if it’s on sale.

Arslan: The Warriors of Legend

I didn’t really know what to expect from this game. I saw it on the shelf at the library and grabbed it because I thought it might be an interesting JRPG. Spoiler alert: it is not.

Now I’m not going to lie, I didn’t play a whole lot of this game before becoming bored, so maybe it gets better, but given the half hour I did play, the game appears to be about Prince Arslan (Boyfriend: “Wait, that’s supposed to be a guy?!”) learning to be a warlord despite the fact that his dad King Wossname is a huge dick. I understand that the game is based on an anime called The Heroic Legend of Arslan, and like video game adaptations of movies, there are very few video game adaptations of anime that are any good. This one does not appear to be an exception.

The game plays a bit like Dynasty Warriors. Mostly I rode around in circles on my horse, mashing a single button to murder thousands of clones of the same dude. Like I said, boring. I took it back to the library.

Tearaway

This game is bloody adorable, made by the studio behind the equally adorable Little Big Planet. The game is essentially Little Big Planet 2.0 only without the platforming and with the addition of some world-repair mechanics by way of Okami. The upshot of this is that I like Tearaway much more than I liked Little Big Planet, because while I suck at platformers, Okami is one of my all-time favorite games. The game preserves many of the things I enjoyed about Little Big Planet, though, like the fourth wall-breaking narrators and the character and world customization aspects. The idea of using your DualShock 4 lightbar to repair the world with cleansing light is equal parts dorky gimmick and genuine fun, especially when you get to blind the NPCs.

My favorite use of the lightbar so far is when I got to use it as a spotlight for a play that some of the NPCs were putting on. I’m also a big fan of the papercraft aesthetic that Media Molecule has created in this world, and I love the endless customization options, because it means that I was able to make my avatar look like a bunny at the first available opportunity.

That alone gives the game an RPG Rabbit stamp of approval.

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD

I am still trying to decide if I like this game.

I want to like this game. For one thing, I threw down sixty bux for the damn thing over a year ago for the express purpose of playing Episode Duscae, and we all know how that turned out. I played a little bit of the game after playing the FFXV demo, but I was only able to get through the first hour or so before I had to return my friend’s PS4. Coming back to the game now after having played and watched several other PS4 titles really hammers home the fact that this is a very ugly game.

It would have been an ugly game on the PS3. Frankly, I’m mystified as to why it was ported to the PS4. It seems like an odd choice. I mean, I’m glad it made it over to the states, but the game seems explicitly designed as a handheld experience.

That being said, there’s a lot to like. After a few hours of practice with the battle system (particularly the all-important “dodge” command), I’m enjoying the fast-paced action. I like having so many interesting characters to choose from for my party, even if keeping them all leveled and learning their different button combos seems intimidating. Also, chocobos, let’s not underestimate the majesty of chocobos.

I’m also weirdly happy that the game includes a good old fashioned world map, even if it’s also really ugly.

The music is pretty great, and there’s lot’s of fiddly bits to keep me occupied, what with leveling everyone’s skills and completing side quests. Time will tell if it will hold my interest, particularly after I have World of Final Fantasy around to play.

I have a lot of things to keep me occupied on my new console. I have more games on the way, and there’s more on the horizon. (Don’t even get me started on Persona 5 and Ni No Kuni II…) I might even consider trying out some Twitch streaming, since the capability is integrated into the console. And someday when I have an extra five hundred bux lying around, I might be able to get a PSVR.

After all, I reasoned, my primary issues with the game were the weird Kingdom Hearts-esque combat mechanics and the unfortunate predominance of bros as opposed to the usual mixed-gender party. Parish’s observations during his time with the first six hours of the game seemed to indicate that the combat did have turn-based options that opened battles up to be more strategic, something that makes the game seem much more appealing to me. The gender thing wasn’t going away, but I figured I could just deal with it. If this weren’t a mainline Final Fantasy game, I thought, I’d absolutely play it, bros or not, so I ought to just get over myself and look forward to a game that was starting to sound like it was going to be pretty solid.

Critics have notbeenkind to Kingsglaive, but that’s hardly surprising. The movie isn’t really a film; it’s an unusually long opening cutscene to a video game that just happened to be released before the rest of the game. I knew that going in, and you know what, as an opening cutscene, it’s pretty rad. The animation is absolutely stunning, the setting is fascinating with its mix of high fantasy and modern technology, and the voice acting (featuring the likes of Lena Hadley and Sean Bean) was unusually good for a piece of video game media. The action was a lot like Advent Children, a movie which I thoroughly enjoyed: fast-paced, very shiny, and occurring primarily in mid-air. Many of the characters were interesting enough, particularly King Regis, although his charisma may have been helped along by the natural gravitas that Sean Bean brings to any regal role. There was a lot to like here.

What ruined the movie for me was the the women.

Now, look. I know I sound like a broken record, constantly harping on the way that women are portrayed in video games. Why bother politicizing games? Why bring feminist thought into this at all? Why can’t I just sit down and enjoy a game without dragging gender into it? And you know what? I wish I could. I wish I could just play a game without this constant nagging itch of annoyance at the back of my head about gender stereotypes, but I can’t. It’s upsetting. It’s a constant reminder that so much of society has these outdated ideas of what women are and what they are supposed to be, and I don’t want to be those things.

I love video games. I spend enormous chunks of my life playing video games, because I’m passionate about my hobby, I enjoy experiencing stories in a completely interactive way, and I’m a big fan of solving puzzles and using strategy to conquer virtual challenges. And let me tell you, it is fucking disheartening to have this constant reminder in my favorite pastime that as a general rule, women are not as important, not as strong, not as powerful, not as interesting, not as numerous, and not as varied as men.

This is particularly hard to deal with in this, my favorite franchise. Final Fantasy brought me into the modern era of gaming. I played Atari as a child, experiencing a colorful world of primarily genderless pixels. I played Sonic the Hedgehog at my cousin’s house, and while I know Sonic is ostensibly male, he’s a Goddamn hedgehog, so his gender seems somewhat less relevant. Then I skipped straight to Final Fantasy X. This was my introduction to women in gaming:

Lulu, Yuna, and Rikku. Three wildly different women with wildly different personalities who had independent motivations, powerful abilities in battle, and interesting story arcs. I followed this game up with Final Fantasy VII, where I got to hang out with these awesome ladies:

Then I moved onto Final Fantasy VIII:

Are we seeing a theme? Sure, the women of Final Fantasy are often mages rather than front-line fighters, some of them are irritating as hell (I’m looking at you, Selphie), and sometimes they have to be saved by the men, but not always. And that’s the important bit, the not always.Sometimes women need saving. That’s fine. As long as the women sometimes get to be the savior. Like Yuna, who is on a quest to save her entire world. Sometimes women are healers, like Aerith. That’s fine, because she’s contrasted with Tifa, who will punch the shit out of anything that stays still long enough to let her do it. Sometimes women are even the bad guys, like Sorceress Edea in FFVII. That’s all I want. Variety. Acknowledgement that women are as different and varied as men with different strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes and modes of dress.

One of the reasons I like the Final Fantasy franchise so much is that there are always examples of strong and varied women. Always. If we discount Final Fantasy I, which was pretty light on the plot anyway, every single mainline Final Fantasy game has a diverse mixture of men and women in the roster of playable characters. They are almost always outnumbered by the men, but they are there and they are awesome and that was enough for me.

So it was a slap in the face when it was announced that Final Fantasy XV would have only men in the party. It was salt in the wound when director Hajime Tataba explained that this choice would make the game “more approachable” and more “sincere and honest”. My experience with this “more approachable” game was a sour one when I played the demo and discovered the sole example of female representation over the course of the experience:

But still. After a year of feeling frustrated about this, I was starting to come to terms with it. It could still be a good game. Maybe the final product would have more women in it, and maybe those women would be interesting. Maybe those women would take a more central role in Kingsglaive! After all, Lunafreya is right in the center of the poster! After all, Hironobu Sakaguchi himself said that the movie justified the lack of women in the game.

So I rented the movie and sat down to watch it last night with Boyfriend. And no. In case you were wondering. No. It didn’t justify anything. It just made everything worse.

There are exactly four women who speak words in this movie. Four. One is an unnamed female chancellor of King Regis. She appears in one scene and speaks a single line in favor of making peace. One is the Queen of the neighboring kingdom of Tenebrae, the Princess Lunafreya’s mother, who is tragically murdered approximately half a minute after she appears. One is Crowe, a mage in the Kingsglaive army, who manages to survive about thirty minutes before she too is tragically murdered. And one is the aforementioned Princess Lunafreya, who is ostensibly a central character.

Let’s talk first about Crow.

Well, hey, she looks pretty cool. And she wants to be a great, strong character. And I want her to be a great, strong character. But she isn’t.

FYI: The rest of this post contains heavy spoilers for Kingsglaive.

She appears in the first battle early in the movie, a battle between the elite soldiers of the Kingsglaive and the forces of the powerful empire Niflheim. The men of the Kingsglaive are clearly badasses, teleporting around the battlefield, destroying monsters, saving one another. What are Crowe and the other four women of the Kingsglaive up to?

Why, they’re hanging back as mages, shielding the big, strong men! Because of course they are.

Now I just want to point out as an aside: there is nothing wrong with women being mages. My point here is that these are the only women in the Kingsglaive. There are no women in combat on the ground. They are only support.

But fine, whatever, later on Crowe gets to go on a covert mission on her own to sneak into Niflheim and escort Princess Lunafreya to safety!

Hell yes, maybe the girls will get to kick ass together as they fight their way out of Niflheim together, getting to know each other, establishing some rapport together, and then maybe they can show up later in the game itself and be the kickass women I look for in a Final Fantasy game, and then…

OOPS NEVER MIND

No, instead, Crowe is delivered back to the city of Insomnia in a body bag. We don’t see her die. We don’t know what happened to her. She simply becomes a plot point in the character arc of Libertus, who vows revenge on the king for throwing “the weak to the wolves”. The “weak” in this analogy being, of course, Crowe. Later on, we get to hear from General Glauca about how Crowe cried when he shot her. That’s the last we hear about her in the movie.

Here’s our last woman, the Princess Lunafreya Nox Fleuret.

She’s in the middle of the Goddamn poster, so she must be strong and important! Right?

No, of course not. She spends twelve years locked in a tower as a hostage. She’s offered in marriage to Noctis, the prince of Lucis and the son of King Regis. All she wants to do is fulfill her “duty.” What her “duty” is we never find out, unless her duty is to be passively passed off from man to man over the course of the movie, first from her brother Ravus to Aldercept, leader of Niflheim, who brings her to King Regis in order to marry her to the prince; then from King Regis to Nyx, a member of the Kingsglaive assigned to guard the princess, the main protagonist; then from Nyx to General Glauca, who kidnaps her as a ruse; then she’s stolen back by Nyx, who takes her back to Regis, who sends her off with Nyx, who eventually passes her off to Libertus.

At one point in the movie King Regis and Aldercept have a conversation in which Luna is referred to as a precious object that has been stolen. Regis comments that this stolen object has “a will of its own,” but she must have a will of her own while she’s off screen, because on screen, she is only a receptacle for the will of the men surrounding her.

But the absolute worst moment in the movie, the moment I threw up my hands in disbelief and disgust, the moment I just stopped giving a shit about anything else that happened, the moment that I knew that Lunafreya was never going to be allowed to be anything but an object, came in the last thirty minutes of the movie. Luna and Nyx have fled the scene of the murder of King Regis, whose last action was to entrust Luna with the precious Ring of the Lucii, an artifact that allows the worthy ruler of Lucis to command the power of the crystal. Anyone unworthy who puts on the ring bursts into flame and is consumed by the ring’s power. General Glauca has pursued the fleeing princess and her guardian, and he’s got them cornered against a statue. Luna is holding the ring. She knows she’s not of the royal blood of Lucis, she knows that putting on the ring will likely result in her death, but she’s going to do it anyway, because she knows that there’s no other way. She isn’t afraid to die. She starts to put the ring on her finger…

…only to have Nyx snatch it away and declare that he’s the hero, not her. He puts the ring on. He saves the day. He saves the princess who is not permitted to save herself.

Nyx sends Luna away from the scene of the battle with Libertus. She buckles herself in his car next to the latest man in a long line of men who get to be responsible for saving her, since she can’t save herself. She looks at Libertus and says, “My life is in your hands.”

Her life isn’t in her own hands. She’s nothing without the men surrounding her.

So fuck you, Final Fantasy XV. Don’t feed me any more lines of bullshit about how the lack of women in the game is “justified” and “more approachable”. Your treatment of women has done nothing but alienate and insult me and all other members of my gender. You have, in fact, made your game and its world completely unapproachable for fully one-half of your audience. I came to this hoping for a Yuna, an Aerith, a Terra, or a Rinoa. You gave me a passive object instead, a pretty princess to be traded back and forth like a shiny bauble. You gave me a tragic plot point in the arc of a male character poorly disguised as a badass. You gave me nothing.

UPDATE: About 30 minutes after posting this, I became aware of Sqaure Enix’s latest marketing push for FFXV: #FFLegacies. Fans are invited to share their experiences with the Final Fantasy franchise on social media. Very well, Square Enix. Let this be my “legacy”.

It looks absolutely amazing, but more than that, the theory behind it, as described by this developer, is both technologically and philosophically fascinating. To not build a merely finite virtual universe, but instead, to set in motion the laws by which an infinite virtual universe is governed with mathematical theory and lines of code? If everything that this man says is accurate, then he and his team are in actual fact playing virtual gods, and that is stunningly interesting. That is some Star Ocean: Til the End of Time-level shit right there. Not that I think that this program is sophisticated enough to spontaneously generate sentient life, but it may be a gradient towards that idea. Artificial evolution seems a step in an interesting new route towards artificial intelligence.

…I’m also a little worried. SquareEnix hasn’t exactly been pleasingme with its Final Fantasy choices lately. The game is being produced by Tetsuya Nomura of Kingdom Hearts fame, and while I absolutely love the Kingdom Hearts franchise, the gameplay styles of those two franchises are typically quite different. Nomura has stated that the Final Fantasy VII Remake is not an HD port remake, it’s a remake-remake, and that means updated gameplay. Maybe not everyone loves turn-based menu combat with random encounters, but I am actually quite fond of FF7’s ATB battle system. I rather hope the gameplay will be a happy medium between the strategy-driven menu-based combat Final Fantasy fans know and love and the kinetic, bouncy madness of a Kingdom Hearts battle. Just as long as Cloud isn’t whacking materia out of enemies like they’re pinatas. I’m not sure I could deal with that.

Because nothing says “brooding hero” like sparkles exploding from the corpses of your slain enemies.

AND SPEAKING OF KINGDOM HEARTS…

Yay, finally! Some gameplay footage! Nomura is certainly keeping himself very busy. I don’t really have much else to say about this. It sure looks like a Kingdom Hearts game: chock full of more deliciously nonsensical and dramatic plot elements than your average anime and upping the ante on its already apparently-LSD-fueled combat system with the addition of Disney themepark-themed attacks. Which is…a choice. A perplexing choice, certainly. But a choice, nonetheless.

Because nothing says death and destruction like merrily-spinning teacups.

E3 also gave the starved masses a new Star Ocean 5 trailer with some gameplay footage tacked onto the end!

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I really enjoyed the last Star Ocean game, but damn, it was definitely no Till The End of Time. Although Integrity and Faithlessness is an incredibly stupid subtitle, the gameplay this time around looks really solid and the engine is quite lovely. Unfortunately, no one talks, which doesn’t allow me to judge if the voice acting is any better than it was in The Last Hope. I certainly can’t imagine it being any worse.

Square Enix also showed this crazy thing off at E3.

Yes, because “adorable,” “wee,” and, “peculiar” are the three adjectives I most would like to be accurate descriptions of a new Final Fantasy game. Okay, actually, who am I kidding? I love adorablethings. If this game is half as charming as the weirdly adorable Final Fantasy: Theatrhythm, I’ll probably quite enjoy it.

I was happy to discover that Square Enix has a survey to gather feedback about their Final Fantasy XV demo, because I have a lot of opinions about it. So I’m really glad Squeenix allowed me to share the following with them:

“This did not feel like a Final Fantasy game. It plays like Skyrim meets Kingdom Hearts II.

Let’s be honest, it also LOOKS like Skyrim meets Kingdom Hearts, too.

Now, I’m not certain that’s necessarily a bad thing, as I enjoy both of those games, but it’s not really what I’m looking for in my numbered Final Fantasy games. The battle system was almost fun once I started to get used to it, and with a bit more practice, I think I might actually enjoy it. I will say, though, if there are unskippable quicktime events at the start of every boss battle, then this game will tire my patience quickly. Navigation was difficult, and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find the entrance to the Behemoth’s canyon every time I wanted to head back there after camping, but after I figured out how to set destination markers on the map, I was able to navigate a little better. A word of advice: if you’re going to have an open world design ala Skyrim, copy one more thing from Skyrim, the quick travel. Being able to teleport to already-visited locations makes an open world fun to explore instead of a boring chore across which to journey.

I might have forgiven many of these issues if the demo contained a compelling story, or even a story at all; alas, Episode Duscae is largely free of context, making it difficult for me to determine how I felt about any of the characters. I know I feel slightly irritated that the entire party is male.

Quite the sausage party.

One of the most compelling things about Final Fantasy as a series is the typical inclusion of strong, interesting men AND women as playable characters. Yuna, Terra, Celes, Fran, Tifa – the list goes on. Your frankly baffling decision to make the party all one sex, thereby guaranteeing that at least half of your potential audience remains unrepresented was unfortunate, but forgivable – I’ve played men in great games before, and I’ll do it again. However, I was in fact more dismayed after finishing the demo.

In the demo, only one female character has a name or interacts with the party, and that is Cindy, the ridiculously and almost offensively sexualised Cindy. When you arrive at your party’s broken car, all you see is Cindy’s butt.

YOU THINK I AM JOKING

Seriously, her NPC model is bent over, frozen, with her ass in the air, and she remains that way until your quest is achieved and the garage reopens. Her model just stands there, thrusting her ass into Noctis’ face. It’s utterly ridiculous, and it made me laugh when I saw it, but in disbelief rather than delight. This is my gender representation?

Also, this is not how boobs even work.

A pin-up girl mechanic in daisy dukes?

Sure, you dressed Fran in lingerie, but at least I got to have her shoot bitches in the face with arrows and intone cryptic warnings about the Mist.

Even wearing inexplicable stilettos, she can kick your ass.

This was a pretty big disappointment, SquareEnix. I’m glad Final Fantasy Type-0 HD turned out to be so amazing. You can keep ogling Cindy’s butt. I’ll be over here, stabbing bad guys with a longsword as Queen, one of those awesome female characters that you’re usually so good at.”